How to Calculate SEO ROI for a knowledgebase or support portal
-
Dear Moz Friends,
We are trying to calculate SEO ROI for our customer support website driven by Self-Help documents, Support Videos, and path to contact our Live Support. We would like to collect your valuable thought/inputs on how to better calculate support website SEO ROI.
A typical customer journey scenario:-
Customer searches for a solution to a problem with our product in Google/Yahoo/MSN
-
Customer then clicks our link in the SERPs that addresses his/her current problem
-
Customer lands on the link, reads the fix/solution and does one of the five below-mentioned actions
- a) Customer resolves the problem and clicks the ‘Yes’ button to notify us is he is satisfied. Eventually, the customer leaves our support website.
- b) Leaves the website as a result of resolving the problem without clicking the Yes or No button.
- c) Customer does not resolve the problem and clicks the ‘No’ button to notify us that the problem persists even after he/she tried to fix the problem using the support/help document. Then customer might contact us using the contact button (when takes them to Live-help options page).
- d) Customer clicks the ‘Contact Us’ button to contact our live support agent either via chat or phone, who will help resolve the issue.
- e) Searches using the Internal Search, if the link doesn’t seem to solve his/her problem and can hop onto other support documents.
Note: The website is purely for support. We currently do not cross-sell, or up-sell, or do any marketing activity like conversion, etc.
Please share your thoughts and help us figure out the ROI formula for our efforts. Let me know if any questions.
Thanks,
Norton Support SEO team. -
-
In general the ROI (Return Of Investment) is calculated as (gain of investment - cost of investment)/cost of investment, which gives a good measure of what you get compared to what you spend. As you probably already know, the higher ROI the better.
In your case, you have a knowledge database for computer problems solving. As you also note in your question, you don't do any marketing activity, therefore there is no straightforward way to measure the gain of the investment.
One key point to mention is the buying cycle which explains the 5 steps to convert your site visitor to a customer. Aw****areness: Through your SEO people find your website and get to know about your products and your services.
R****esearch: After getting on your site, people can search for more information about your product/service, and refine their search.
Preference: This step contains the process of making the final choice and the confirmation of it.
Purchase: Now that the final choice is made, the visitor can be converted to an actual customer. Loyalty/advocacy:.After the purchase, we expect a satisfied customer that will come back to the site, and search for other products/services that are provided.The last step takes us back to the first one, as we make a customer aware of more products.
As you can see, the key point is the marketing, that you make people know what you "make" and try to convince them that they need it. That is the main aspect of ROI.
On the other hand, I noticed that you don't have anything related to the social media (facebook like and share, tweet, etc). That is the best tool in our days to attract people and let them know what you can provide. In fact it is also a very good way to boost your ROI. Even in your case, it would be imperative to have people to able to share their experience on your site, for example: "I was very satisfied by this article" along with a link of a solution shared on facebook or after contacting your live support to share that "The article didn't work for me, but they have a great online live support!". This will bring more people on your site searching for answers and/or solutions.
If you would like more information, check also these links:
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/16/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-your-seo-campaign/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/06/27/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-your-social-media-campaigns/ -
This is just my opinion. I am certain that accountants and pseudoaccountants will disagree.
This is how I would value the site if I owned it.
If your website provides accurate, easy-to-find and easy-to-follow advice for lots of Norton's most frequently-encountered customer problems then the website might have a positive ROI from a branding perspective. Since you don't sell anything or try to sell anything then you really can't calculate a direct ROI.
If your website provide skimpy, inaccurate, hard-to-find advice then it should be closed down because because it is stinking up your brand and the ROI is negative. Lots of companies have support websites like this. The worst ones have a forum that nobody visits where you can ask a question and it might get answered next year by a spammer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Very High Impressions and 0% Organic CTR Impact our SEO Rankings?
I have a very strange feeling that someone bad is trying to hurt our company, but maybe I am wrong. Let me explain. In the last two month, we have seen a very significant drop in sales on our website, but we couldn't figure out why. We have looked at different metrics (Google Search Console, Moz, Google Analytics), but everything looked alright. We had 10% loss in traffic, but we didnt believe at the time that it could be the main issue. Just yesterday we've discovered the following (please see attached screenshot😞 On August 18, 2018 Google launched Search Update On the same date, we had a jump in Organic Search Impressions for one particular keyword, which we never tracked before: "free facebook login". Majority of all impressions (233,000 out of 258,000) were from Philippines. Very low total number of clicks (50 clicks) led to 0% Average CTR for this keyword. Which in return, also lowered our global CTR by 1%. One month later we had 1000's of spam emails sent to our Helpdesk from two IP addresses, also from Philippines. We blocked them of course. It could be all coincidence. I dont know. But do you think that someone can use this fraudulent tactic to lower our CTR and drop our ranking and traffic? Can this influence our SEO in any way? It's also possible that someone is attacking Facebook and we just happen to be there, on the first page, for the same keyword. Should we try to eliminate our page for this keyword and see what happens? I've checked this article from Rand Fishkin - https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and it seems that CTR is an important factor. However the article is from 2015 and maybe it's no longer relevant. What should we do? Thanks! G86Nge4
Conversion Rate Optimization | | plumrocket11 -
What kind of home page need to be, to show good results of SEO?
Hello, i have couple questions about new home page building. I want to start build new home page to replace old one. At this moment my home page is obsolete and shows low conversion. My costumers often have negative thoughts about existing one. My knowledges in coding is weak, where should i pay more attention to design, to section placement, to pictures and video gallery? Can hosting positively or negatively affect to SEO results? How to make the new website load faster? Here's my website's example. http://www.skydas.lv http://www.m-lux.lv http://www.sosdienests.lv Thank you very much, waiting for replay.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Felter0 -
Help with ecommerce duplicate pages and SEO advice(magento base site)
Hi, We have a magento build site (www.mokee.eu) and are selling our own branded goods. So far it is a very limited range of products. It's 1 baby crib in 5 variations. We recently started getting more sales from the site, so I started to look a bit more into optimising our site. I rewrote item name, created better descriptions, added meta titles and description etc. and subscribed to the MOZ analytics platform to understand a bit better ways to improve things up. From what I saw we have a big issue of duplicated content because our product pages are the same and only the product colour changes, which is something google apparently doesn't like However it is important for us that each colour get referenced by google so people who search for grey cot can find a picture of our grey cot etc... Also I was thinking to create only on multi variation page with all colour but when you have only 1 product to sell it might look a bit empty on the site. 1- Do you guys have some advise on how to go round this issue? 2- Do you have any other advise for my site in particular to optimise things and actually do you think i should be worried at all with such a small catalogue? Thanks Sam
Conversion Rate Optimization | | mokeestore0 -
Adwords Support...
Hi Mozzers, I have a Adwords campaign that I am taking over very soon. Involves quite a big spend (between £500-£1000) a day. Sales and conversions have dropped and I am coming in to try get them back up. I know my way around but with this ever changing Adwords tool now I would like to some decent tips if anyone has any on how to increase conversion, use of sitelinks, is optimizer any good, and get the Ad to the top of the page (currently around 3-4th). any help would be great. thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | YNWA0 -
Which rich snippet is better for SEO ?
Hello guys, I have rich snippet on my blog, actually I have 2 kinds of them... rating star and authorship... both of them apears on google when my site appears on the results... BUT.... just one of them by time. I notice that when someone rating one of my blog post, then in the google results for that post, It will show the stars and not the face of author and vice versa.. So I would like to know about your experience, wich one is better for seo and gain clicks, authorship or star rating ?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | lans27870 -
Have My SEO Cake & Eat It - Mix Viral Content & Business Content?
Hello, I optimize for a fashion, eCommerce site which has catalogue pages and product pages. http://www.zando.co.za/ We're currently working on a large "blog" which tons of great content designed to attract readers, links and tons of long tail traffic. We'll be doing how-to videos, celeb interviews, top-tens, etc. etc. We'll even have a UGC community section eventually. Really great. Now, I want to use the links generated by this section to rank for generics like this: For example: I want to rank for "Lingerie" and I have this page set up as the target: http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/ I create some amazing content that generates lots of links containing the word "lingerie" . That awesome content lives in:(hypothetical URL:) http://www.zando.co.za/fashion/magazine/how-lingerie-has-changed-over-50-years/ I want to (and this is where you come in 😉 get people linking to my catalogue page (http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/) where they can find a banner or something alluding to that piece of link bait (the /fashion/magazine/ url). Perhaps similar to the Wordpress style <read more="">page break on posts?</read> Reason is, I want my "Money-Page" to get the links with "Lingerie" in it. Problem is, it'll be another click to the thing they want to find. Also, say I decide a few months later that I want to do another piece, like "lingerie in films" and do the same. My 'banner' idea would get very crowded or, it would mean that I bump the 50-years piece, which then makes for bad UX for readers clicking through looking for the old piece. Or perhaps this can all be solved with good design? Here's a WBF talking about mixing content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday Does anyone have an example of someone doing this well? PS. Was also thinking that on my "archive'' url, in between the content, I'll query for the top products that, that piece speaks to and make it possible for people to add to cart as they're reading the link bait content that is relevant to the product. Cheers Paul.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | RocketZando0 -
Advice on SEO for Chinese Website in China
Hey folks, I am a little out of my depth here because I have never SEO'd a website that is not in English - and especially in China. I have a few questions that I hope someone can help with? What are the primary SE's in China Are there any specifics with regards Keyword Research Are there any specifics around SEO techniques and climbing up the SERPs? I know I don't speak Chinese but I will need to be advising. Thanks, Andy
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Conversion optimization with Optimizely, impact on SEO
I am looking into signing up with www.optimizely.com for conversion testing. They put scripting on my site which will then redirect half of my site visitors to an alternate home page. The site I want to test on is ranking quite well with Google and I do not want to hurt my rankings. And with this set up,what Google will think is my home page is not and so I am essentially sending visitors to a different page than Google reads as my home page in source code. So, my concern is whether this will have a negative impact on my SEO rankings to redirect 50% of site visitors to a different page using this testing tool? I would use Google Web Site Optimizer, but many of my sites are in Wordpress and it seems that Wordpress and web site optimizer are not so compatible. Advice would be appreciated. Thank you, Robert
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Robertnweil11